The 1 Thing Better Than Being a Perfectionist

A popular story in design circles involves an allegedly real experiment by a ceramics professor and his students in which he divided the class into two groups, A and B, for a semester.
Group A was to produce as many pots as possible, whereas group B was to focus on just one each, in order for them to “perfect” it. At the end of the semester, he graded the students’ work and discovered that the highest graded pots were produced by those in group A, which means those pumping out the larger quantity also produced the highest quality. The work of those focused exclusively on one pot suffered.
I’m always suspicious of anecdotes such as these, especially when their virality makes research into their veracity a needle-in-a-haystack search. But it’s no great stretch of the imagination to believe that students with the opportunity to learn from the countless successes and failures of making mountains of pots for a semester were the ones producing the occasional “perfect” one and that those relied upon to produce one perfect pot by semester’s end would feel an immense pressure—and ultimately choke.
READ: Are You a Precious Actor?
Actors auditioning at least five or six times a week